Today, many businesses use computer applications to interact with customers, vendors, partners and employees. Traditional access to these business computer applications requires dedicated software on a local computing client like a desktop or workstation computer. To improve scaling and remove the need for dedicated software, access to most networked computer applications is currently through a standard web browser that points to external and internal websites. Generally speaking, applications with web based access may be referred to as web applications.
Architecturally, most web applications have a presentation layer that is accessed by a web browser running on a standard laptop or desktop. This presentation layer typically consists of standard technologies like HTML, Adobe Flash, XML, Java etc. to provide users a rich interactive experience. With the proliferation of mobile devices, businesses want to provide web application access to their customers, vendors, partners and employees through mobile devices such as smart phones, handhelds, tablets, netbooks and thin clients.
When mobile device users access the same typical web application presentation layer that a web browser on a personal computer with a full-sized monitor uses, their experience is poor. The reason for this poor experience is because mobile devices typically have a smaller screen, they do not support a separate keyboard, they consist of varied hardware and processor components as compared to traditional computers, and in some cases do not support a full fledge web browser. This results in suboptimal web application functionality or no functionality at all. Additionally, web browsers on mobile devices may not have full access to advanced features of new mobile platforms like gesture sensors, compass, headset, location sensors, GPS, cameras and proprietary UI (user interface) features. The restricted access to the full advanced feature set of the mobile platform further reduces the user experience.
To solve this problem conventional wisdom has led software vendors to build simple and small website pages targeted for mobile device access through WAP gateways. However, the experience with such pages has not been popular and consequently, the growth and adoption of simple web pages for enterprise and web application access has been limited.
Moving forward there has been a new paradigm shift in mobile devices to access web applications. This new paradigm uses native software or applications running on mobile devices to access web applications. Examples of such native software are iPhone® (i.e., iOS®) and/or Android® applications. The native applications on these mobile devices communicate with web applications using standard or proprietary transport mechanisms like TCP, SSL, HTTP and other similar technologies. Such native applications can interact with the web application data in an optimized fashion using the mobile device's specific hardware capability and graphical user interface features.
These native applications are typically custom built for each target web application and for each separate mobile platform. This means that each web application will need multiple corresponding mobile device applications to match the target hardware and address a specific function or portion of the web application. This strategy exponentially increases the complexity and cost of building and managing native mobile device applications for corresponding web applications. While expensive and burdensome, this native mobile device application strategy has gained momentum for consumer applications that have thousands of users. This point is evident by the success of the iPhone App Store® and Android App Marketplace®.
However, the cost and complexity is increasing for businesses that desire a native mobile device application for each mobile platform and for each enterprise application. Developers are required to customize views based on role based access control, add enterprise specific security, and integrate the application with existing web applications. This is very expensive and time consuming. Additionally, the skill set required to build native mobile applications is practically non-existent in company IT organizations.
In addition to the problems with creating the custom applications, enterprises are entering the next generation of remote access, productivity and connectivity by offering access to corporate data and applications on personally purchased mobile devices. With the explosion of native consumer applications employees are demanding enterprises support and offer remote access to work-related applications on their personally purchased mobile devices.
Supporting personally purchased devices in the corporate environment is a problem for companies because employees control the data on their device. Employees may leave at anytime with their personally purchased device and take the corporate data and applications with them on their mobile device. Companies have no basis to ask employees for their device so they can wipe company data. Furthermore, there are unanswered questions regarding company liability, confidentiality, care and other legal issues surrounding the mixing of corporate and personal data.
CIOs, IT, and developers need a comprehensive solution that will secure and isolate corporate data on personal devices, enable native application based access to enterprise applications, provide offline synchronization capabilities and most importantly give IT full control of company data and access rights.